A San Francisco Superior Court judge today tossed a lawsuit filed last month by Corey Smith alleging District 5 supervisorial incumbent Dean Preston lied about his housing record on his candidacy filings for the November election.
Smith, executive director of the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition, sought to prevent Preston’s claim that he “[v]oted to approve 30,000 new homes, 86% affordable” from being printed in Voter Information Pamphlets. Smith wrote in an email that he does not plan to contest the ruling.
The Housing Action Coalition is a self-described group of advocates for “building more homes at all levels of affordability to help alleviate the Bay Area and California’s housing shortage, displacement and affordability crisis.” Its business members, from which it draws funding, include housing developers, YIMBY Action and Airbnb.
In the lawsuit, Smith argued that 8,250 of the units included in the 30,000 count cannot be considered “new homes,” because those were hotel rooms Preston voted to temporarily lease during the Covid-19 pandemic. Judge Richard Ulmer dismissed Smith’s complaint as “linguistic fencing,” writing that, based on the definition of “home” as a place of residence, “many thousand San Franciscans reside in hotel rooms for months.”
Smith also took issue with the inclusion of 10,000 units authorized for development by Proposition K, which Smith argues Preston did not himself vote to approve. Rather, he argued, Preston “merely voted to place this measure before voters for their approval.” The judge retorted that Preston’s actions and the board’s approval were prerequisites to voter approval and the qualifications statement “is truncated.” Given its 200-word limit, “it is not a civics tutorial,” Ulmer wrote.
Smith claimed that San Francisco approved only around 14,000 units of housing in development projects during Preston’s tenure on the board, according to annual reports the city submits to the California Department of Housing and Community Development. But the judge responded that the “homes” referenced in Preston’s claim are not limited to housing development projects.
Smith wrote in response to the ruling: “It’s a point of disagreement. Preston’s anti-housing votes speak for themselves.”
Preston’s campaign wrote in a release that he “has long been a thorn in the side of corporate landlords and real estate lobbyists,” calling the Housing Action Coalition a “developer lobbying organization” and Smith a “longtime opponent” of Preston.
Preston characterized Smith’s lawsuit in a press release as part of a “multi-year disinformation campaign” against the candidate. “My hope is that this court ruling helps turn the page,” Preston wrote. “The smear campaign against my housing record has been a big distraction.”
That was quick. SFHAC’s former director Todd David (aka Scott Weiner’s campaign chief strategist) and his protege Corey Smith who filed this spectacularly frivolous suit stopped dead in their tracks. Good.
Someone needs to call the SFFD, because these crypto swindlers and enablers of the get-rich-quick schemes of fly-by-night developers are lighting so much money on fire in their political flailings.
Bilal made a lot of noise over this. Bet he’ll keep his trap shut now. Just like he hasn’t disavowed Garry Tan wishing death on Dean and others.
Bilal, Scotty and Autumn might not have attention spans or trajectorial and historical awareness, but D5ers do.
Perhaps you could recommend a neuroscientist who might be able to help them with their attention span issues.
I know just the one.
Lives here, or just adjacent?
Still waiting for SF YIMBY to re-evaluate its endorsement of Mahmood after he took a literal NIMBY stance on much-needed affordable housing on Parcel K in Hayes Valley.
Dean Preston, meanwhile, has consistently supported Parcel K housing and pushed for it to happen, and championed the tallest development in the Haight in decades if not ever – the affordable housing now rising at 730 Stanyan, at the site of the former McDonald’s – even urging the mayor to make it taller than her original proposal so more people could get housed.
YIMBYism has sold out its original premise in San Francisco and is now just about fighting against progressives.
And Bilal and his YIMBY/developer crew of “moderates” don’t want affordable housing on a parking lot in Hayes Valley because they have their sights on turning the well-gentrified neighborhood into a “revolutionary” tech utopia and such a dreamland certainly needs a glorified parking lot to serve as its townsquare and does not need to provide housing to people who come to do the actual work in the neighborhood (like barista-ing up the lattes or whatever the latest craze is, busing tables, washing dishes and all the other things that keep “paradise” the way they want it. There is surely a substantial overlap between those people and the ones who still say “TechCrunchDisrupt” without either busting into laughter or throwing up.
Campers,
As I recall this is what’s called a ‘Slap Lawsuit’ and a very elaborate one designed to draw resources from the Board’s most Progressive member during an election year.
In some states these suits are illegal and their targets can be awarded ‘cost/plus’ for their troubles.
In 2003 Newsom’s handlers kept a bank of Gonzo’s machines occupied for a couple of days then didn’t even pick up the material they sought.
Subterfuge, dirty tricks, allegations of sexual misconduct and graft …
A typical San Francisco Election Cycle hits its last 100 days.
Go Niners !!
h.
California has a strong anti-SLAPP law. To challenge a SLAPP suit in California, defendants must show that they are being sued for “any act . . . in furtherance of the person’s right of petition or free speech under the United States Constitution or the California Constitution in connection with a public issue.” Cal. Civ. Proc. Code § 425.16 (2019). Under the statute, the rights of free speech or petition in connection with a public issue include four categories of activities: statements made before a legislative, executive or judicial proceeding; statements made in connection with an issue under consideration by a governmental body; statements made in a place open to the public or a public forum in connection with an issue of public interest; and any other conduct in furtherance of the exercise of free speech or petition rights in connection with “a public issue or an issue of public interest.” § 425.16(e).
FYI,
Sorry.
Like most folks while I’m not a lawyer or doctor or scientist I do occasionally play those roles on the internet.
So, should Dean sue or would that just be falling further into the trap ?
You’d think that moving Daly’s Tenderloin base into 5 would make him unbeatable but when Elon Musk hates you …
h.
It’s okay not to be a lawyer or doctor or scientist. Anyway, as Bilal taught us until he got caught, “being” a scientist (or at least a neuroscientist) just requires a lot of Internet ad saying you are one.
From what you’ve said before, I also know that you are not a small business owner like Mark Farrell.
Won’t comment on the suing part, but I’ll riff on that and just call those out to get Dean the sewer.
The anti-Dean crowd repeats the same things to make the case that Dean is “out of touch,” whereas the carpetbaggers have nothing substantive to offer that distinguishes them in terms of policy details, governing style, and political vision.
Dean gets blamed for things he didn’t do (they pre-date his time in office or are the responsibility of various department heads who are controlled by the mayor). On the other hand, Bilal lies on his resume (I’m a neuroscientist), offers irrelevant geography to make him seem fit to serve (remember when the Mission Local cartoon of him included “lived adjacent” to D5 for two years?), becomes a renter in the TL to give himself an air of authenticity, has yet to disavow Tan and Musk for their authoritarian schemes to liquidate or imprison Dean and others, and magically decided he’s a progressive once he learned that D5 voters like progressive politics (his endorsement votes on the DCCC make it clear that he is not a progressive since he can’t even support progressive candidates in other races).
Bilal’s biography on the Internet is pretty meager, and I imagine that is deliberate. For someone who worked in the Obama administration, has a graduate degree from the University of Cambridge, and “entrepreured” himself to success and philanthropy, there should be more publicly available information.
We do know this, however: in 2022, Bilal spent just shy of $600,000 of his own money to try to buy himself the job of state assemblymember. I’ll do the math: Bilal spent more than 15 times the annual income of a full-time minimum wage worker to try to get elected to public office. Bilal’s failed primary campaign was the largest beneficiary of his “philanthropy” that I have been able to locate. HIs “non-profit” does not have any federal filings for a 501(c)(3) organization, nor has anyone I know found information about its board of directors.
When he carpetbagged into D5 in May 2023 (to help GrowSF dump Dean, Bilal got an apartment at 50 Jones Street, a luxury building whose website says it is “Mid-Market,” not the Tenderloin. Nor did Bilal have to compete against a large number of other apartment seekers. He could “move in today,” as the website boasts. Despite the absurd number of vacant units in “bespoke” and “iconic” luxury lifestyle buildings, Bilal still insists we need to build more housing at “all income levels.” Yeah, because Laurene Powell Jobs, for instance, might need more housing than the two SF residences she’s been in the news for recently – the two that cost roughly $90 million (in other words, they didn’t set her back at all) and are only about a mile from each other. Anyway, if she needs a place to live, she can move into one of the four places she owns in Malibu.
The “green” technical adjustments to “reduce carbon emissions in households” (Saikat Chakrabarti, Coauthor of the Green New Deal, Bilal Mahmood CAMPAIGN EMAIL JULY 16, 2024) are literally meaningless when he is silent on the massive wealth inequality that makes poor people have to drive in from far-flung places to work in SF (no remote work for them) and allows others to jet around from wherever to wherever so they can pick out more real estate to buy, then remodel (and jack up the cost of labor and materials so normal construction becomes a budget breaker for others), and finally likely never visit again once it’s firmly in their portfolio.
I expect a lot of thumbs down. I’ve been relishing those, because they represent the same kind of secretive sniveling that counts as politicking for the “moderates”: don’t say anything concrete, don’t offer details, and don’t admit who you are.
Oh, you mean corporate real estate lobbyist Corey Smith? Does he still live in Florida?
With 13 vacant units to every inhabitant of San Francisco (source: United Way), I don’t think Preston is the one to blame here.
Corey Smith is a jack wad lobbyist for luxury developers…..a soulless weasel and Todd David’ s disciple. The two of them cooked up this stupid frivolous lawsuit to hobble the current supervisor. Both are foul and truly scummy YIMBYs……market rate opportunists who, in a city of tenants, never once have joined with tenants. Never forget BARF and pinup girl Sonja “I-love-the-sound-of-my-own-voice” Trauss. Thank God she has infants who occupy much of her bandwidth now.
Riffing on Commentor2928’s comments now…….The new elephant in the room for the recently arrived carpet bagger candidates Bilal, Autumn and Scotty is America’s national and (and SF’s citywide) fentanyl crisis and how if elected czar of the Tenderloin, they would “disrupt” it.
While campaigning, the 3 trained monkey candidates repeatedly reference 5150s and “drug market disruption” as the Holy Grail. Do you know how impossibly difficult it is to 5150 someone? Bilal, Autumn and Scotty don’t. Equally troubling: Bilal and Autumn (not sure about Mr. Let’s Ride) have latched onto the teachings of an unscientific and controversial Stanford psychologist (NOT a medical doctor, NOT a chemist. NOT a pharmacologist, and NOT EVEN a fake neuroscientist) named Keith Humphreys and his NOT laboratory tested and NOT data driven theories about addiction. Remember the guy is a psychologist, so while Humphreys could possibly offer relationship counseling, he is not accredited to speak about the habits of or brain processes of chemically addicted drug takers. But hey……the guy went to Stanford so……..
Do you trust the fake neuroscientist with Stanford blinders on who has made Humphreys’ unproven (because he is not a scientist or medical doc) theories about fentanyl and drug addiction the center piece for his (Bilal’s) campaign plan to “disrupt the drug markets”?
Equally problematic: all 3 carpet bagger candidates keep repeating “If we don’t disrupt the TL drug markets, they will spread to the rest of D5 and the rest of the city.” Um. Kind of an odd statement because the fentanyl crisis is already a citywide (and yes, nationwide) crisis far beyond the Great Wall that separates D5 from the rest of the city. Have you recently visited the Embarcadero or Cesar Chavez or along Lombard in the Marina or Van Ness, or Polk Gulch or Ocean Beach or Golden Gate Park or the Richmond, the Haight, lower Pac Heights or North Beach (or really ANY SF neighborhood) lately? The three carpet bagger candidates are so new to the newly gerrymandered D5 neighborhoods that they don’t realize (or won’t acknowledge?) that D5 only very recently absorbed the Tenderloin and its decades long challenges in the recent gerrymandering of the 11 districts.
Weak carpet bagger candidates blame the current supervisor for everything that is wrong in D5, the Tenderloin and SF. D5 voters are thoughtful and smart and we have long memories. Tell us how you will solve our problems and challenges and quit blaming Preston. As London Breed like to say “We are tired of your bullshit!”
The carpet bagger candidates conveniently blame Preston for not solving the national and citywide fetanyl crisis. The TL was formerly D6, Matt Haney’s (Bilal’s vanquisher) district and was copagandist Matt Dorsey’s district too.
ahahahahaha. haters gonna hate.